As a young alumna who, while at Dartmouth, never had any intentions of joining a Greek house, but who graduated with a deep respect for all that the Greek system means for Dartmouth's students and loyal alumni body, I feel I have a unique perspective on the current campus issues. I graduated from a liberal, all-female high school and was convinced that a Greek system could only be detrimental and inherently sexist. I was sure that only a college that had already abandoned its archaic Greek system could support my social ideals. Nevertheless, I fell in love with Dartmouth upon my first visit for one very simple reason: contrary to what I saw at numerous other colleges, the students at Dartmouth were happy. This was apparent when I spoke to students walking around campus, when I spoke to my alumni interviewers and when I spoke with my father and his friends from the class of '67. The campus was alive and active, and people walked around smiling. I have never regretted my decision to go to Dartmouth. In fact, I regard my time there as a gift. I graduated self-assured and happy, satisfied with both the academic and social opportunities I had been given.
And although I spent the vast majority of my weekend nights with my friends in their fraternity houses, or at sorority parties, I never even considered rushing. It seems to me that much of the attention over the past two days has focused on current Greek members, both students and alumni, who don't want to lose their beloved houses. But I think the social changes proposed by President Wright and the Board of Trustees have many more implications than that. For example, the idea, several years old now, of building a second Green has always been troublesome to me. Had the new Green been around during my time, I might never have met my many premed and math-major friends, as I was a humanities student and would probably have spent much of my time on the original Green regardless of who might be hanging out by the science buildings behind Baker. The idea of separated dining halls, of fragmented social space, worries me in the same way. Students will eat and hang out where they live,
and the diverse unity enforced by Dartmouth's current dining and social spaces will be destroyed.
This leads to my firmest belief about the good that the Greek system does for our campus. While at Dartmouth I visited friends at other schools all over the Northeast. And never were my friends as happy with their schools as I was with mine, and never was I truly impressed with their schools' social visions. For example, Williams, a school isolated much like Dartmouth, abolished their Greek system and now has coed dorms in the houses that were once fraternities. These houses still hold the parties, and the people who live in them are still responsible for the parties' themes, etc., but for some reason, every time I visited there I felt there was something missing. Years later, I realized what was missing was a sense of devotion. Those parties were school-sponsored. There was no tradition, no meaning, no sense of proving how great a house could be. Dartmouth's traditions are legendary (the precise reason for all the recent national publicity) and, for good or bad, they make the
school what it is, and they are the reason alumni come back again and again for Homecoming and Winter Carnival.
I am not trying to claim that there is nothing wrong with life in Hanover. Of course that is untrue, and I am happy to realize that the current students seem to be working as hard now as they were years ago to improve upon problems such as safety (particularly of young women), drinking problems and the search for new social options. But at the same time, Dartmouth continually ranks at the very top in terms of student satisfaction. There certainly may be some call for change, but who ever came up with the idea that this change need be so drastic? If nothing's really broken, just in need of some fixing up, why start over from scratch?
Several times during the past few days, our current issue has been compared to 27 years ago, when the school went coeducational. Even a liberal female student like myself can understand why some men of that era may have been opposed to changing their school so entirely. And yet they had to. Not only was Dartmouth responding to strong national pressure, but even the students, in a campus-wide vote, agreed that coeducation was the best plan. But where is the student vote now? Where are the years of deliberations?
Over the past few days, President Wright has been accused of being a hypocrite and of leading on the students. Unfortunately, having never seen or heard him speak, I cannot pass judgement, but I believe that the mistake (and it must be a mistake) of releasing the news to the Associated Press before even contacting students leaves the president and the Trustee Board with the unfortunate realization that the students and alumni are still able to make a change. Their mistakes are our window. They underestimate our power and have drawn national press into the matter. I do not live in the Northeast and cannot join in with the protests on campus, but I am proud of all who do. I also hope that alumni who are far away, as well as students on off-terms, etc., will join in to show that a college should be created and upheld around the ideals of its students, not its president.
